Create a drive image?

[mikelato]

Hello,

Does anyone know the best way to create an exact image of my server hard drive? (I have tried norton ghost but my system uses LVM and norton ghost has an issue with that).

Is there a command built into linux that works well or am I better off using software to boot the server and ghost it that way?

Thanks for your input,
Mike

 

[nobaloney]

There's no way to create an exact image of a hard drive while the server is running at runlevel3 or at runlevel5 (networked system) because the drive is continuously being written to. You can use a linux live distribution (Knoppix, Ubuntu, etc.) to boot the sever from, and then use the dd program to create an image, either directly to another drive (perhaps connected through a USB port) or to a file on another drive.

Jeff